Mid Eastern Muslim Brotherhood

It is claimed that the Arab Muslim Brotherhood is deliberately holding back on its religious message for the moment, in the middle of a people-driven revolt that is purportedly not being determined by either Islam or politics.

The organization proclaimed its support for opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mohamed ElBaradei, a secularist with Western democratic principles, as a transitional president, if the Mubarak government was put out of office.

Esam Shosha, a movement member said "The revolution does not belong to any one group. We are one country. It's not just about the Brotherhood, at least not now; it's about all Egyptians."

"They don't want to appear as if they're using this revolt to seize power. What they want is free and fair elections to allow them to take power transparently," an analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, Wahid Abdul Magid, said.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the world's most influential Islamist movement and the oldest and largest Islamic political group. Their goal however, is to also penetrate and take over other Muslim organizations in order to unite all Muslims to the general aims of the brotherhood.

The organization's beliefs are moderate when compared with many of the world's more militant Muslim organizations. However, it rejects the idea that a woman, or a Christian could be president of a Muslim country and would lean the nation's laws toward more rigorous Islamic codes. It would certainly ban alcohol and topless beaches at the resort of Sharm el Sheik. The organization also prohibits dancing and other such pastimes.

Hassan al-Banna, Islamic scholar and Sufi schoolteacher, who believed in reclaiming Islam's manifest destiny, an empire stretching from Spain to Indonesia, founded the organization in 1928.

The organization's goal is to instill the Sunnah and Quarn as the 'sole reference point for ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual and community and state'. It generally opposes violence to achieve its aims, though division has been created within the group, through its stance on no violence.

The Egyptian government accused the group of a campaign of killings in Egypt after World War II, as the organization strongly opposed Western colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Egypt, with members being arrested, in spite of the membership being kept a secret. The brotherhood was involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and assisted in the overthrow of secular Ba'athist dictators in Syria.

Al Qaeda has censored the brotherhood and charged them with 'betraying the cause of Islam and abandoning the 'jihad' in preference to forming political parties and supporting modern state institutions'. While studying at university, Osama bin Laden claimed he was influenced by the religious and political beliefs of many professors, who had strong connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.